It's been ongoing for several years but you might have missed it. Vast reductions in cost. Continuous improvements in energy density. New chemistries. All very real and on the roads right now. Compared to 2008 which is when Tesla started producing cars and now (16 years), there been a massive progress on this. Even in the last few years, prices have come down a lot.

This article is talking about the next wave of improvements that are already out of the labs and in early test production. For example Quantumscape has been delivering on the roadmap they talked about years ago with regular updates. A few weeks ago, they announced that they are shipping so-called B Samples, to VW and other partners for testing. Right on time.

A B Sample is a pre-production quality but more or less feature complete battery cell. The next step is A samples, which are the more or less finished product. Those are supposed to be ready end of next year. From there they go to production; probably starting around the late 26/27/28 timeframe. That last step will be conditional on massive investments needed to build factories.

There will be a lot of new cells getting to production around the same time from companies like CATL, Factorial, BYD, Toyota, etc. CATL has announced 500wh/kg cells two years ago.

I know it's popular to be dismissive about any talk of battery improvements here. But this is not the same as some new hypothetical thing but companies that are in the final steps of bringing proven & working technology to market. They've all gone through many years of testing and iterating already. This stuff is coming to market. The only question is when and for how much.

People have unrealistic expectations. This won't be high volume, low cost production from day 1. Rather the opposite with cost gradually coming down and volume gradually going up. We'll be driving very cheap versions of existing chemistries for years to come. They're not going anywhere. Production for those cells is measured in multiple twh/year now. The revolution there has been the scale and cost.

Truly the Year Of The Linux Desktop

Yeah, we'll know the battery revolution has arrived when the US needs punitive 100% tariffs to stop imports of low cost, high performance EV cars from a developing nation. Until then it's all talk.

Meanwhile we can talk about two US companies promising that their magic beans are the future.

I still feel burned by EESTOR.

It was probably the last time I allowed the, uh, implications of such a technology to overwhelm my judgment about whether or not it will actually happen.

Not really the question always is that when will see see the advancement in actual products and this article seems to answer here it is.